When Should You Block Someone from Your Medium Posts?

It should not be done without reflection and guidelines, but sometimes it must be done.

I am talking about Medium writers, but it could apply to any platform and all social media.

There are times when a reader-or more likely, a troll-posts a comment that adds nothing to the post or the thread the writer hopes to develop; in most of these cases, the words of the troll diminish the impact of the piece, because many readers will be turned off by comments that are hostile, bigoted, untrue, or all three.

The problem becomes most pronounced when one writes a piece about the Middle East from either a neutral or a pro-Israel perspective. If the piece has a big enough reach, you can expect the following:

• The slogan “From the River to the Sea,” Free Palestine,” or “Death to Israel” will be written numerous times, in the style of naughty schoolboy forced to write 100 times “I will not misbehave.”
• Cut and paste jobs purporting to recite the “true history” of the region, invariably claiming that Jews were not indigenous to Israel, and Judaism and Jewish culture are recent arrivals. (Which is actually largely the case of the people who call themselves Palestinians; most of them arrived in the 19th century to work on Zionist projects. They came from the Gulf nations and other surrounding areas. Jews have an unbroken history of over 5000 years in Israel.
• Conspiracy theories galore will fly from the keybords…